Archive for July 10th, 2008

Well, this time, the mainstream media is actually beginning to cover the honor murder in Atlanta. I do not understand why they never covered the honor murder of the Said sisters in Dallas about which I have previously written many times at this blogsite. But–in only a matter of days, CNN not only wrote about it; they also turned to an alleged expert who says that honor murders are no different than domestic violence cases world-wide.

On July 9th, CNN posted a piece HERE about the Atlanta case in which a Pakistani man has been charged with killing his 25-year old daughter. CNN turned to Columbia University Associate Dean of multicultural affairs, Ajay Nair, who is quoted as saying:

“My immediate reaction was that this is an anomaly in the South Asian community… Most South Asian-American families enjoy wonderful relationships within their families. I think there’s ways that we can rationalize it and make sense of it, particularly in thinking about new immigrant communities in the U.S. and thinking about some of the struggles that they face and the generation gap and the cultural differences that children do face,” he said. “I think there are some issues there, but by and large, this isn’t a rampant problem within South Asian communities. What is a problem, I think, is domestic violence, and that cuts across all communities. I think more people need to recognize this as a global issue. It’s not just a U.S. issue. I think it happens across the world, and I think people need to recognize domestic violence and any kind of violence related to women as a serious, serious issue.”

Nair said he believes a “significant human rights campaign” is needed to address such killings.

Well, I agree with Nair about the campaign but about little else. I am working on an academic piece about this right now for Daniel Pipes and do not want to steal my own thunder but for example: Most (non-Muslim/non-South Asian) batterers do not kill their daughters or wives and when and if they do, they are not seen as “heroes” or “martyrs” and they are not protected by their families and communities. They are rarely prosecuted in their home countries.

The Passover Plot, Gospel of Judas, and the Jesus Ossuary follow 2000 years of attempts to undermine the pillars of the Christian faith: the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Now, the “Gabriel Revelation” can be added to the mix.

What is the Gabriel Revelation? It is a text, written on a stone tablet in the first century B.C., that purportedly refers to a suffering messiah that will die and rise again.

To Christian critics like Israel Knohl, the tablet confirms the theory that a suffering messiah was an established part of Jewish tradition well before the appearance of Jesus. Well, yeah: Genesis 3:15, Psalm 22, Isaiah 52 and 53 and Daniel 9:26 tell us as much, so what’s new?

According to the decipherers, the tablet refers to a messianic figure who is told he will be slain and “in three days you will live.” Such detail, it is argued, means that the Gospel writers penned this prediction in their narratives after the fact. Except that, as I have commented, the Gospels were “written within the lifetime of eyewitnesses, [so that] any fabrication on the part of authors to fudge the facts would have been readily contested by any number of hostile contemporaries.”

So why that added detail should raise eyebrows is more than a little perplexing, considering that there are hundreds of prophecies about Jesus recorded in the Old Testament centuries before His birth, the most astonishing being the precise year of His triumphal entry into Jerusalem predicted by Daniel (chapter 9:25-26) 300 years prior.

Nevertheless, for the better part of two centuries, critics have been citing myths of Olympian deities impregnating human women to sire half-gods, and dying and rising Corn-Kings, as proof that the Christian narrative is one of human invention. C. S. Lewis saw it differently.

To Lewis, myth at its best is a penumbra of divine light that inspires the human imagination about the true nature of things—much of which is stamped onto the design of nature.

Myths about the Corn-King abound because of the natural pattern of life, death and new life which presages the “real Corn-King who will die once and rise once at Jerusalem.” Lewis writes, “We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, dying nobody knows when or where, to a historical person…under Pontius Pilate.” He concludes, “We must not be nervous about ‘parallels’ and ‘pagan Christs’: they ought to be there—it would be a stumbling block if they weren’t.”

In the same way, myths — in the sense of what Lewis might call “true myths,” or general revelations — like those that appear to be contained in the Gabriel Revelation, “ought to be there,” as we get closer and closer in time to the “myth that became fact.”

Still waiting for the Union Jack to come down and the moon of Islam to go up in it’s place. You Brits are getting closer and closer each day.

Britain’s top judge obviously doesn’t fully understand the tenets of Sharia law, says Islam critic Robert Spencer, or the judge wouldn’t have given his blessing for the use of Sharia law in Britain to resolve disputes among Muslims.

According to the Daily Mail, Lord Chief Justice Nicholas Phillips’ endorsement has already created a huge controversy across Britain. In a speech at an East London mosque, he said that Islamic legal principles could be employed to deal with family and marital arguments and to regulate finance. Phillip’s recommendations came just five months after Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams suggested that Islamic law could govern marital law, financial transactions, and arbitration in disputes.

According to [Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch], Sharia law allows women to be treated like commodities. “Apparently that is just fine by the Chief Justice of Great Britain,” he comments. “He doesn’t seem to realize just how much women are devalued in Islamic Sharia law — even the ostensibly benign version of Sharia law that he thinks he would be instituting,” Spencer notes. “[O]bviously this is a man who doesn’t know what Sharia is really all about.”

This should last about 30 seconds in court before the judge throws it out. But in our world of judicial activism, I’m sure it will have to go all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court before it is dismissed.

A homosexual man who has a blog on Sen. Barack Obama’s campaign website is suing two major Christian publishers for violating his constitutional rights and causing emotional pain, because the Bible versions they publish refer to homosexuality as a sin.

Bradley LaShawn Fowler, 39, of Canton, Mich., is seeking $60 million from Zondervan and another $10 million from Thomas Nelson Publishing in lawsuits filed in U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Michigan, the Grand Rapids Press reported.

Fowler filed his claim against Grand Rapids-based Zondervan Monday, alleging its Bibles’ references to homosexuality as a sin have made him an outcast from his family and contributed to physical discomfort and periods of “demoralization, chaos and bewilderment,” the paper said.

He filed suit against Tennessee publisher Thomas Nelson in June.

Zondervan says that even if Fowler’s claim is credible, he’s suing the wrong party. A company spokesman told WOOD-TV in Grand Rapids that Zondervan doesn’t translate the Bible or own the copyright for any of the translations but relies, instead, on the “scholarly judgment of credible translation committees.”

U.S. District Judge Julian Abele Cook Jr. refused Monday to appoint an attorney to represent Fowler in the Thomas Nelson case, saying the court “has some very genuine concerns about the nature and efficacy of these claims.”

Fowler, who is representing himself in both lawsuits, says in his complaint against Zondervan that the publisher intended to design a religious, sacred document to reflect an individual opinion or a group’s conclusion to cause “me or anyone who is a homosexual to endure verbal abuse, discrimination, episodes of hate, and physical violence … including murder.”

Fowler alleges both Zondervan and Thomas Nelson, with its King James Bible, manipulated Scripture without informing the public by using the term “homosexuals” in a New Testament passage, 1 Corinthians 6:9.

He told the Grand Rapids TV station in an interview he wants to “compensate for the past 20 years of emotional duress and mental instability.”

Zondervan, he contended, is misinterpreting the Bible.

“These are opinions based on the publishers,” Fowler said. “And they are being embedded in the religious structure as a way of life.”

Dozens of nations dominated by Islam are pressing the United Nations to adopt an anti-“defamation” plan that would make Christians criminals under international law, according to a United States organization that has launched a campaign to defend freedom of religion worldwide.

“Around the world, Christians are being increasingly targeted, and even persecuted, for their religious beliefs. Now, one of the largest organizations in the United Nations is pushing to make a bad situation even worse by promoting anti-Christian bigotry,” the American Center for Law & Justice said yesterday in announcing its petition drive.

The discrimination is “wrapped in the guise of a U.N. resolution called ‘Combating Defamation of Religions,'” the announcement said. “We must put an immediate end to this most recent, dangerous attack on faith that attempts to criminalize Christianity.”

The “anti-defamation” plan has been submitted to the U.N. repeatedly since about 1999, starting out as a plan to ban “defamation” of Islam and later changed to refer to “religions,” officials said. It is being pushed by the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference nations, which has adopted the Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam, “which states that all rights are subject to sharia law, and makes sharia law the only source of reference for human rights.”

The ACLJ petition, which is to be delivered to the United Nations High Commissioner on Human Rights, already had collected more than 23,000 names in just a brief online existence.

The ACLJ’s European division, the European Center for Law & Justice, also has launched its work on the issue. It submitted arguments last month to the U.N. in opposition to the proposal to institute sharia-based standards around the globe.

“The position of the ECLJ in regards to the issue of ‘defamation of religion’ resolutions, as they have been introduced at the U.N. Human Rights Council and General Assembly, is that they are in direct violation of international law concerning the rights to freedom of religion and expression,” the organization’s brief said.

“The ‘defamation of religion’ resolutions establish as the primary focus and concern the protection of ideas and religions generally, rather than protecting the rights of individuals to practice their religion, which is the chief purpose of international religious freedom law.”

“Furthermore, ‘defamation of religion’ replaces the existing objective criterion of limitations on speech where there is an intent to incite hatred or violence against religious believers with a subjective criterion that considers whether the religion or its believers feel offended by the speech,” the group continued.

Interestingly, in nations following Islam, the present practice is to use such laws to protect Islam and to attack religious minorities with penalties up to and including execution, the brief noted.

“What should be most disconcerting to the international community is that laws based on the concept of ‘defamation of religion’ actually help to create a climate of violence,” the argument explained.